The 'internet of things' is sending us back to the Middle Ages

Imagine a naive young king who doesn't understand how to do anything for himself. He will easily be controlled by those around him that do understand the world.

Of course, nobody before ever understood everything about the world. But different people understood different aspects in depth, and education gave literacy so people could share expertise.

Software is so complex that nobody really understands it. Nobody understands how a car works, nobody understands how a phone works, because they are both controlled by hopelessly complex software. Governments can't regulate emissions because the software changes the emissions controls based on arbitrary unknown factors. Security problems are just a small subset of the surprising ways complex software behaves -- surprising even to the software engineers who build it.

And the key is that this is all new complexity that didn't exist before. Physics and biology were developed to understand pre-existing complexity, so we always made forward progress. But we are moving backwards now because we are introducing complexity faster than we are understanding it -- much faster.

Therefore this is actually worse than the naive king mentioned above. In that example, it's just an asymmetry of information, and that can be resolved through education. Software is so complex education can't hope to keep up.

> Most "serious" users reformat the machine and re-install the OS to get rid of the OEM included crapware. [...] It's a matter of inconvenience, not impossibility.

And this is why said Lenovo included the crapware and spyware in non-volatile memory that is executed by Windows boot automatically by design, so your reinstallation doesn't work as intended unless you change the OS you're installing.

It is Apple who pioneered this concept of the device that the user really does not own or control - the "smartphone". The computer that remains tethered to the manfacturer continually feeding back user data.

Manufacturer makes replacing the OS difficult. Manufacturer gets root. Manufacturer gets right to modify OS remotely. And no surprise, manuacturer gets plenty of data about users. Manufacturer did not ask for these privileges. They just took them. It was not always this way.

But users accepted it.

And so other companies followed Apple's lead. I find the company's official statements about how they protect privacy to be offensive to common sense.

Want to protect privacy? Stop forcibly collecting any and all data. (Not just "less than so-and-so".)

If users really believe that sending data to Apple will help Apple create the "best experience" then let them opt-in to collection and send it voluntarily.

The users own the device. If they wish untether from Apple's "ecosystem", then that is their right.

There exists at least one user who does not want a company to collect their data, put it on a networked computer and then purport to "protect" it. They want the company to stop collecting their data. Why? Because they have weighed the risks and decided it is not worth it.

IMO the "smartphone" is part of the IoT and was the first "thing". Because it was a thing where software was used to take away some of the control from the owner (control that owners had previously); owners only get partial control.

Going forward, if one is opposed to internet connected things one does not fully control, the solution is not to select the things that collect the least data or that offer the most control. ("I trust Company X because they collect less data than the other companies.") The solution is to choose things that are not internet connected.

There are plenty of companies like Facebook and Google that have no regard for user privacy but I wouldn't include Apple in that bucket.